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“Scotch Mist” was a webcast of a private concert by Radiohead streamed by Current TV on 31st December 2007. It features all tracks from their album “In Rainbows”. Forme the best album in the world. This video has a special emotional value for me, because I played it for years everytime I played the classic online game World of Warcraft. As soon it was over i started it over. I think it must be around 800 times that i watched and heard this video. I found a home in my youth with the music of Radiohead and the virtual worlds of Arzeroth. I think I will never feel that safe again.

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I want to talk about shortly about one of one of my favourite series.

My best friend told me about Mad Men in early 2015. Yea. You might think that it is obligatory to knew this series. But here in germany it didn’t became a hit. Mad Men is just too american. You can really feel the vibe if you are not socialised in america or very bespoke in late american history. So back to the story. I started to watch the first Season. Five hours later I find myself eating Strawberry Sorbet from the package. A friend told me that good series destroy our dignity. I think he was right.

The first thing that catched me was the Intro. A RJD2 track with drums by Bernard Purdie. Damn. I did knew both tracks, but now about the connection. RJD2 is a must-to-know

I got really really fast addicted to Mad Men. Watching episode over episode. It was one of a trip.

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Im back with a theme I want to talk about a long time but no one really can talk about with me and care about it, so here it comes.

My most favourite drummer nowadays: Stella Mozgawa.

Stella Mozgawa is best known as the drummer of Warpaint. If you don’t know them: Check them out. Since their Exquisite Corpse EP they are well known in world of rock music. On that EP drums are not played by Stella but by no other than Josh Klinghoffer, amazing Producer, Musician and best known as the successor of John Frusciante for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. On Warpaints first Album "The Fool", Stella took over and was just the perfect choice. Here calm Style matched the psychedelic music of Warpaint(also she is a woman, that helped). I heard some Warpaint Songs before, but it was at a Festival in 2012 were I was fully enchanted. To the point I saw them live, I never, ever felt - or I think can feel the same ever - vibe that Warpaint brought on stage. The air was vibrating. I was really amazed by the playfulness of the band. Improvisation, Songs and Solos flowed into each other so perfectly and with a kind of naturalness that I keep that dynamic still in mind as my personal goal for making music. Stella and the other Warpaint Member took 2015 to work on Solo Projects, after touring with their second Album. Her other three Bandmates are working on Solo Albums, but Stella chosed to play for many other musicians. Such like Jamie XX, Kurt Vile, Andy Clockwise and for me some of the must-watch artists of this year, London based drummer Georgia. She is a very entertaining person with very cool stories and role models

Stella as a drummer is one of a kind to me. In this time of eclectic music everywhere and hypercomplex Genres, you will name automaticly name more than 3 genre-references if you have to discribe some new music/band/musician. If you try to do this with Stella, you brings this to a point where it is so complex to discribe, that I find it just too exhaustive to name anything. It's like the hypercomplex structure collapsed, and in this ash Stella rises as a drummer with a very own Style and she is really the only one I can say that about nowadays. I can name every modern jazz and rock drummers influences by judging his playing but Stella... it's just to much. You can't really say anymore that she 'took' something because she took everything. Everything becomes Nothing. The best start on Stellas playing is definitley Composure

jonas

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Since two years I create a mixtape for every month. This is the one for May 2015. 

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Frickin perfect!

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The sound of my childhood.

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Moin Jonas, sag mal spielst du immer noch beim Final Bar Orchestra mit?

Klar :-) Mittlerweile am Drumset sogar. Bald kommt unsere zweite CD raus. Ich werd dir auf jeden Fall ne Kopie schicken.

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Some uncoordinated words. I'm getting into BADBADNOTGOOD lately. I did not have a good start5 with them, because they were praised as a jazz band, what the don' were for me in the frist thought, but I'm now coming to the conclusion that they are a jazz band.

Hip Hop music started with old jazz and funk records, and mixed than with afro-american spoken word traditions and dance and art from the streetculture to form a big mess that became over the years a whole new culture. Jazz did was before that the main culture in the afro-american society.

Now Hip Hop coming back to its roots. It not anymore Vinyls that shape the music but real instruments, so to reintegrate the jazz seems just locial since the drums and the typical bass came from that. What we have now is a very raw mix between this styles, that made me a hard time to accept, that you can call it now jazz. But since J Dilla, Roots and all the other afro-american music in the last decade came closer to the jazz, It could be obvious for some folks. For me personaly it is very hard to say that there is a clear genre for all this hiphop-to-jazz-movement, for me It's just a part of that big cloud that I call 'afro-american culture'. Hip Hop will become a new piece of the jazz as a new sub-genre that you could call hip hop jazz, like it happendes to jazz-rock and soul jazz. I'm allready seeing in our jazz club and on the internet that songs by Dilla or Erykah Badu becoming something like 'standards', like Real Book songs.

And yeah, now back to BBNG. The covered, A Tribe called Quest, for me one of my early contacts with hip hop. But not in the original. Before that I had the Bizarre Tribe record by Amerigo Gazaway in 2012 on rotation. All his records are very special to me. They are some of the few records that are every two or three months again on rotation.

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Would be the Best Festival of my life.

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Again I'm here to connect the dots.

I was browsing through some Mel Lewis Videos and if you are want to watch Mel lewis you just have to watch Thad Jones to, because a big span of his careers he co-lead a Big Band with him. The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchstra. And so I came to a track that I played some years ago with the Big Band that I'm playing in, called US, It's just a fantastic song. A bit like a Fourth of July March and some heavy Jazz-Rock. The Break in the middle was for me like the first meeting with the 'Breakbeat'(I was 14 at the time we played the song), and I was very happy as I later found that element in many other tracks, especially in Hip Hop and Funk.

Later this day I was hearing some Esperanza Spalding on NPR and came to a Live Video that I never saw before, where she and her band are playing US. Her Version ist great and suits her repertoire very good, but it is missing some flair, because of the small band that can not cover the whole range of sounds that The TJML Orchestra played.

If you did not knew Esperanza you should check out her Radio Music Society Record.

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It's all about that Jazz, 'bout that Jazz.

Beka Gochishvili said that his most favourite song to play is Brazilian Love Affair by George Duke, when is playing with Stanley Clarke. He sure does a really great Job on that, but his genius is just so much bigger, and does come not really get through on that song.

His Caravan Interpretation with a touch of Chopin, is just breath takin. And he is just 18 years old.

And he won a grammy with 16.

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Must been a Magical hour of jazz history.

Painting of Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker jamming at The Open Door in Greenwich Village, September 1953 by Tom Roderick and the original photograph. 

I’ve been to some amazing gigs but this must have been something else. 

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I stumbled upon Monty Alexander some time ago. And because I liked the track I searched further and came to a track, that is heavily used in sample music, for example by Joe Bada$$ or Brock Berrigan. You can hear that the sample is only changed a bit - and thats good. Because the original is so fucking perfect.

You can give Monty Alexander credit for introducing jamaican influences to the Jazz and Pop music. All his songs have this touch of latin block chords, heavy accents on 3 and old school jazz licks. It's just some of the grooviest shit out there.

As I came today back from a workshop with the Big Band that I'm playing in, I was searching through stuff of Jeff Hamilton, who is at the time very famous in the drummer community for his brush techniques. For the people who are reading actualy who is drumming on their favourite records, he is well know. I could list tons of frickin big names from the music history for that he did play the drums. Especially for me as a Big Band drummer, there is tons of stuff that I can learn from Jeff.

Johny Clayton, the other name-giver of the Orchestra and conductor is maybe a bigger legend than Monty Alexander. He did play for the godfather himself: Count Basie and mother frickin Henry Mancini(I did found a while ago out, that John Williams played for Mancini). And what I did not know until today, he played all the time with Alexander and Hamilton. All this incredible connections!

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Just wrote the last test in this semester. More posts per day coming soon.

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Putting random stuff in your Piano, thats the thing of Volker Bertelmann, better known as Hauschka.

In the December of 2013 I was in our local Jazz Club. The Bunker Ulmenwall. There was a special evening with the pianist Volker Bertelsmann. He talked about his way to the piano and his inspiration. He started to prepared the piano at the age of 11. What his parent do not like. He was putting little nails in to the heads of the hammers of the piano. Now he is doing that for a living.

It started with a tour of the Band "Die fantastischen Vier", a very famous german rap group for that Bertelmann played. They were in Ireland and some friends of him had a studio there and encouraged him to record a piano record. So he did. I was called "Substantial" and only a few of his preparation techniques were there to hear.

But than he became more and more influenced of the techno and rave scene. He just loved dancing and that beats. So what he than played on the Piano sounded not like anything that you would expect from a piano.

Now he is the most contemporary name in the small genre of the prepared piano. Before that the biggest Name was John Cage. My drum teacher told me also about Alexander von Schlippenbach, but thats some bat-shit crazy Freejazz stuff that i can't stand for long.

He did especially an exciting collaboration with Hilary Hahn.

Than i saw this amazing video because one of my firends is just a huge D'n'B Fan mailed it to me. And than i noticed that it was Bertelmann on the Synthesizers. But what I also noticed was Sebatsian Vogel on Drums. Vogel is better known as a part of the Avantgarde Band Kante. They make music you have really hard to think about, that because they never got popular, and because they never had a genre. They came from the german side of the Brit-Pop, called "Hamburger Schule", with very deep, melancholy and philosophical lyrics which reminded me of Gustave Flaubert. They then later got in to music and soundtrack for theatres and got really famous in that special genre. Now they are back with a hybrid-like album with parts of both or their musical worlds. I'm very excited for this recording.

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Oh Man! I'm getting goosebumps!

Listen to Binkbeats. This amazing guy just covered - No, that's the wrong word - he reproduced the sound of amazing electronic beat songs. Like J Dilla, Caribou, Shigeto, Flying Lotus or frickin Erykah Badu.

As i heard Bowls by Caribou about five years ago, I thought that this is the most amazing sounding thing ever. And this guy just reproduces it acusticaly. I'm fuckin shocked. And he evens sounds better than Shigeto live(to bad that KEXP took their recording of him down).

I think no one of the artists he covered, did play their tracks just as good sounding as on their recoding in a live set. But he managed to get that. The only thing that comes me in mind that is perfect like that are Temples. Their big ass church-reverb is live the same as on the record.

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As i started crate diggin, the first record i got up to was "My Thing" by Sven Libaek, an australian composer who was active in the late 60's and early 70's. On my journery on all the crate and library music webistes, I found out that Libaek is one of the best known composers in the Library community. His records are very rare and cost sometimes a couple hundred bucks on discogs. But if you are a digital native you could get the easy. If you are further interested in his story read this

The crate diggin thing was just another episode of my love with Hip Hop that actually started with the Beastie Boys and MF Doom, who also sampled Libaek in his track Basket Case.

Which brings me to the artist that came around with that basket case thing. No. not frickin Green Day. It was Ella Fitzgerald, the grande dame of Jazz who got famous with her song A Tisket, A Tasket.